PROVNCETOWN — Harwich native Brian Zayatz left Cape Cod after he graduated from Nauset High School in 2015. He majored in Black studies at Amherst College, spent some time working on a farm, and toured as the bassist for a slacker rock band called Stoner Will and the Narks (the spelling is a jab at former Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz, who had been a supporter of deploying surveillance cameras downtown — the city council rejected the idea).
Zayatz has returned to the Cape to join the Provincetown Independent’s newsroom this winter as the Mary Heaton Vorse fellow in community journalism leadership. The fellowship is supported by the newspaper’s nonprofit partner, the Local Journalism Project. Besides expanding his reporting experience, the post also involves him in discussions about out how local newspapers can survive and grow.
Zayatz got his introduction to reporting in 2018 when he started writing for an Easthampton alt-weekly called The Shoestring. He was still in college, and the publication’s founders, Will Meyer, Blair Gimma, and Harrison Green, were friends.
“At the time, I didn’t really see myself in a journalism career,” Zayatz says. “But I found through doing it that it actually lined up with a lot of things I cared about.” Those included “transparency and accountability of people who wield power on the local level and the chance to involve more people in the stories that get told about their communities,” he says.
The Shoestring’s focus is on investigative, accountability journalism — something that had been disappearing in Western Mass., where Zayatz has been living.
“People in local government were getting used to not being asked questions about the things they were doing,” he says. “We wanted to make sure people had the information they needed to be active participants in their community.”
Zayatz, who has lived in Wendell, Hadley, and most recently Turners Falls, took on a regular reporting beat — the Northampton City Council — in 2020. That year he closely followed a successful push by activists to cut the city’s police budget during the George Floyd protests. He says he was usually the only reporter at city council meetings, which seemed inappropriate in a city of 30,000 people.
“It’s not that there aren’t newspapers there,” he said. “They’re just being thinned down so much that they aren’t sending anyone to city council.”
Zayatz became managing editor of The Shoestring in 2021. In that role, he has worked to help writers develop a slightly less “alt” and more straightforward reporting style. “The focus is the same,” Zayatz says, “but the voice is a little different.” He wants the online publication’s work to appeal to as many people as possible.
During his fellowship here, Zayatz is still finding a little time to play a supporting role at The Shoestring, which is now an all-freelance organization. He’s left the other two members of the core team, editor Dusty Christensen and reporter Shelby Lee, at the helm. His hope is that the fellowship will provide some experiences that can help The Shoestring grow.
Last week, Zayatz’s story on how the Outer Cape’s housing crisis intersects with the precipitous drop in school enrollment reflected the kind of in-depth work he enjoys most, even though for him reporting on the schools wasn’t familiar territory. “I was a little bit afraid of it,” he said of trying out a new realm, “but it showed me it’s possible.”
Beyond journalism, Zayatz might be a familiar face — or sound — to those involved in Cape Cod’s music scene: he started performing at local bars while he was still a student at NRHS, where he played the bass in songs like “What Is Hip?” and “Big Noise From Winnetka” with the school’s jazz band. And now his parents won’t be the only ones to know he played the saxophone at Harwich Elementary and the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School.
To tune into the eclectic indie rock mix he likes now, find him on WOMR, where he’s volunteering as an occasional D.J.
